Lawmakers frown on high level of gas flaring in Niger Delta

House of Representatives Ad hoc Committee investigating revenue leakages in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry has frowned at the continuous flaring of gas in the Niger Delta.

The committee disclosed that massive gas flaring is still ongoing in many parts of the Niger Delta, adding that the development has culminated in a huge loss of revenue.

The Committee Chairman, Jarigbe Agom Jarigbe, at the end of its sitting in Lagos, said gas flaring remains a major challenge in Nigeria for many reasons including limited funding of major gas projects, inadequate monitoring, and weak enforcement of sanctions.

“From our preliminary findings, gas flaring is still ongoing in many oil and gas producing areas. This is unacceptable to the government.

“Nigeria has commercial gas reserves which should be harnessed for export and domestic applications. It is in the best interest of all stakeholders, especially oil companies, the Federal Government, and states to bring gas flaring to an end.

“As a committee, we will do our very best, including visiting all onshore and offshore platforms to monitor the operations of the companies,” he said.

A member of the committee, Ehiozuwa John Agbonayinma, said: “The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), must rise to its responsibilities. Sanctions must be implemented to curb the menace of impunity and corruption in the industry.”

Another member of the Committee, Denis Agbo, also called on DPR to provide details of Offshore Safety Permit (OSP); National Data Repository (NDR); and details of its account with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), adding that it was necessary to know the percentage of funds remitted to the Federation Account.

The government recently said it discovered at least 178 gas flaring sites in Nigeria.

The Programme Coordinator, the Nigerian Gas Flare Commercialisation Programme, the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, Justice Derefaka, disclosed that the verification exercise was conducted in conjunction with the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Canadian Government.

Derefaka, who spoke in Abuja, at the Gas Buyers’ Forum, organised by the Gas Aggregation Company of Nigeria, said: “Data is very key to us. Without accurate gas flare data, then this programme is dead on arrival. What we are doing beyond the data that we have at the National Depository in DPR, is that we are going beyond what they have, and we have sent a special template we designed with the World Bank and the USAID, asking for unique data sets from the producers, and it would amaze you what we found out.

“Our verification with our partners showed that we have 178. That in itself is not complete, because we are around 60 per cent, 40 per cent data is missing, some of the information are inaccurate. So, we are doing a detailed information request in the DPR office in Lagos. So that we send this information and get these things back, then these things might increase.

“In this country, right now, we have 178 gas flare sites, of the 16,000 that we have globally in 19 countries. Daily, we flare around 755 million scf per day; you can imagine how much we lose as a country. The carbon credit we would have gotten from this, the electricity we would have generated, the LPGs and the likes of those, even if they had to go to any of the LNG trains.”